The Red Velvet Lawyer

Content Marketing,  the "Long Tail,"  and  Your Legal "Tribe" Last spring, I helped teach our law students about starting a solo practice.  I taught the session on marketing a law practice.  One thing I tried to do was update the so-called "old-fashioned" legal marketing techniques for a more web-based/technology-based strategy. Christine Kane, Gold Mastermind, and Up Level Your Business If we offer it again this spring, I could provide even more valuable advice for 3Ls because of the path I've been on this past year as a member of the Gold Mastermind training offered by Christine Kane through her Up Level Your Business coaching programs. One thing I said last year, that I would repeat this year is this.  We now have cheap ways to find our "tribe" and then provide members of that tribe with high quality content that does several things: Positions you as an expert in an area of law; Let's you tell your story in a mean...

As part of my summer concentration on books written by Seth Godin, I recently read his 2010 Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?  It ties to many of the themes I summarized in my post, “Leaning In” as a Woman Lawyer , found here .   Godin argues that with so many means of direct communication with so many different “tribes” in a hyper-competitive world, each one of us can make an indispensable contribution, as a linchpin, to a business, art, project, or something we care deeply about.  You have the choice of being indispensable.  Just make it. He defines linchpins as the “people who own their own means of production, who can make a difference, lead us, and connect us.”  “The linchpin is an individual who can walk into chaos and create order, someone who can invent, connect, create, and make things happen.  Every worthwhile institution has indispensable people who make differences like these.”   They are artists and givers of gifts.  T...

This week, ASL hosted a Solo Practice workshop for its students.  I spoke on marketing a law practice.  For a very long time, I have enjoyed marketing in the law or mediation context.  It gives me an opportunity to describe the joy I feel when I can serve a client competently, efficiently, and at an affordable cost.  It gives me the opportunity to describe the skills, training, experience, and values I can offer potential clients.  It gives me the chance to talk with the folks I'd like to help. It also gives me a platform for writing about substantive topics that interest me, while -- I hope -- showing I am thoughtful, ethical, and competent.  It also allows me to learn more about people, their concerns, their stressors, and their businesses.   Recently, I started an online business coaching program called, UpLevel Your Business , offered by Christine Kane.  Last summer, I took her personal coaching program and found it very helpful. ...

"We are living in a moment of time, the first moment of time, when a billion people are connected, when your work is judged (more than ever before) based on what you do rather than who you are, and when credentials, access to capital, and raw power have been dwarfed by the simple question "Do you care about what you do?  We built this world for you.  Not so you would watch more online videos, keep up on your feeds, and LOL with your high school friends.  We built it so you could do what you're capable of.  Without apology and without excuse.  Go."  Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception . My little law school, Appalachian School of Law (ASL), sets itself apart from the crowd in several ways, but perhaps its unique feature is a fearless bet on students who might not otherwise have the opportunity to attend professional school.  We tell them: "Go."  Our students, often showing a poorer performance on the standardized admiss...

As I read Seth Godin's new book, The Icarus Deception , I kept asking myself: What is my art?  What do I create joyously, diligently, passionately, and with increasingly greater skill and insight? In the early 1970s, my high school  -- University City High -- had one of the most REMARKABLE art departments in all of St. Louis County.  Staffed by three teachers, the program taught painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, and fiber arts. Thirty years later, I still have pieces of art I created at that time: pencil drawings of my boyfriend and the male rhinoceros at the zoo; a bronze cast sculpture of a heavy-bottomed woman; a huge hookah pipe, made of coiled clay, I now use as a deck ornament; a silk screened T-shirt imprinted with an original design; and watercolor landscapes. The program also introduced me to many techniques and materials that I have used fearlessly throughout my life. The course made me a better problem-solver.  About a week ...

I finished Seth Godin's new book, The Icarus Deception .  I like his "big ideas." In this book, he argues that in a post-industrial economy, in which we are bombarded with media messages, we will stand out only if we give a gift to the world that is REMARKABLE.  The gift, freely given from a place of urgency and pure joy, is our art. While I don't see an effort to clearly define what "art" he means, he uses the term so broadly that it could include any creative effort that you pursue diligently, passionately, and with increasingly greater skill and insight.  It requires you to face down your own fears of failure and inadequacy (which he attributes to the "lizard brain," aka the amygdala and other fear centers of the left brain, mostly). It requires you to pursue your art even when those around you discourage you actively and more passively.  It requires you to separate your art from your own self-worth, so criticism of your art does not unbal...